SOURCE: "The Problem of Freedom and Restriction in the Poetry of A. R. Ammons," in Modern Poetry Studies, Vol. 11, Nos. 1-2, 1982, pp. 138-48.

[In the following essay, Fink explores the tensions between the concepts of individuality and unity as presented in Ammons's poetry, claiming that this polarity gives rise to a political dimension in the poet's work.]

A number of highly regarded contemporary poets, among them Robert Creeley, John Ashbery, and A. R. Ammons, have been accused of evading the responsibility of bringing political concerns into their writing. In his long poem, Sphere: The Form of a Motion, Ammons summarily dismisses this charge, suggesting that his readers are simply blind to the political aspect of his poetry:

they ask me, my readers, when I'm going to go politicized or
radicalized or public when I've sat here for years singing
unattended the off-songs of the territories and the midland
coordinates of Cleveland or Cincinnati: when I've prized
multeity and difference down to the mold under the leaf
on the one hand and swept up into the perfect composures of
nothingness on the other: my readers are baffling and
uncommunicative (if actual) and I don't know what to make of
or for them….

In referring to his concern with "multeity and difference" and "nothingness," Ammons is reaffirming his long-time obsession with what he has termed the "one:many problem," the desire to maintain a sense of unity and diversity in poetry, perception, and other forms of experience. Coleridge in his Biographia Literaria had insisted that great poetry has a felicitous balance of unity and multeity, and Ammons implicitly indicates that the United States of America (with its motto, E pluribus unum) is in many respects exemplary of this aesthetic principle:

I'm just, like Whitman, trying to keep things
half straight about my country, my readers say, what's all
this change and continuity: when we have a two-party system,
one party devoted to reform and the other to consolidation:

and both trying to grab a chunk out of the middle….

In his poetry Ammons never subjects the "one:many" structures of American politics to any rigorous analysis; in fact, he rarely speaks of any overtly political matters for more than a few lines. Nevertheless, he wants the impatient reader to understand that the salient features of the "endless" speculation on unity and diversity, abstract as they may sometimes seem, can be seen to have fundamental political ramifications. In order to demonstrate the validity of this statement, I will consider Ammons' treatment of the "one:many problem" in several poems as a reflection of the dynamics of a particularly political concern: the interplay of restriction (one) and freedom (many) in various aspects of human experience.

According to those who quest for unified, eternal, and totalized vision, the possibility that the spatial and temporal limitations of ordinary reality can be transcended constitutes the greatest imaginable freedom. In the relatively early lyric, "Guide," however, Ammons declares that the attainment of this supposed freedom turns out to be an absolute restriction of individual possibility; it is the "unity" of nothingness or death:

Like Yeats in "A Dialogue of Self and Soul," Ammons warns that the diverse, uncontrollable flux of life is incompatible with the fixity of absolute unity. The "material" forms of life—both their physicality and their relevance to the living—must be sacrificed when an individual embraces a static, metaphysical paradigm of totality. If the "perception" of this absolute is supposed to be the highest kind of vision, Ammons claims on the contrary that no seeing is actually involved; the unified view of all phenomena is an absence in the world of the living.

Of course, those who desperately desire the unity that can be "found" only in death have already ceased to perceive their immediate environment as it is, and they have experienced a death-in-life of "material" concerns. Ammons' warning may apply to anyone with a fixed idea of reality or an inflexible ideology in which it is possible to "turn around." The stasis of an idealized paradigm precludes the possibility of movement or development, and so the "freedom to choose" is obliterated. What had at first seemed a liberation from uncertainty is now a seemingly irrevocable imprisonment in a tyrannical sameness.

Ammons' later poem, "He Held Radical Light," describes the conflicts of a man who feels torn between the delight of the influx of transcendental power and the desire to remain within the security of a human community. In the opening stanza, the "radical light" of transcendence is figured as a version of the "music of the spheres" which came to "the furrows" of the man's "brain/ into the dark, shuddered,/ shot out again/ in long swaying swirls of sound…." This remarkable energy, evoked grandly by the alliteration, seems an almost sexual release from "the dark" of limited perception and the constraints of ordinary experience. As indicated by the use of the word "radical" in the title and first line, the visionary/ musician thinks that he has been allowed to return to the "root" or origin of his being, the source of unlimited power.

But the second stanza immediately discloses that he is afraid this liberating energy will uproot him from the context he has known all his life, a world full of other people. Understanding that "reality had little weight in his transcendence," the man has been terrified of losing contact with the ground (in a literal and figurative sense) "and liked himself, and others, mostly/ under roofs…." Comically, he can appreciate the commonplace restriction or "government" of a roof, because he has the paradoxical awareness that this agent of limitation is actually a source of liberation from a seemingly external force that would (in the name of freedom) coerce the individual to abandon the people and things he values so highly.

If the man finds at times that he desires to experience the powerful influx of "radical light," he knows that to adopt some version of transcendence as a permanent, unchanging attitude would prove an insupportable restriction of possibility, and so he must be satisfied with temporary flashes of transcendence. Furthermore, as much as the visionary/musician may hope to discover the "radical" truth of his self-identity (whatever distinguishes him from all other entities), he desires even more strongly to gain psychological strength from his identification with—or sense of being rooted in—his community:

released, hidden from stars, he ate,
burped, said he was like any one
of us: demanded he

was like any one of us.

As in Whitman's "Song of Myself," the reference to burping is a sign of liberation from the tyrannical allurement of the Sublime, the immaculate starlight, which would reduce the diversity of human behavior into the unity of inhuman perfection.

Although much of Ammons' poetry shows he believes, as he asserts in the long Tape for the Turn of the Year, that "we can approach/ unity only by the loss/ of things—/ a loss we're unwilling/ to take," he clearly perceives the dangers of diversity without any sense of provisional order. As evidenced by a lengthy criticism of industrial polluters in "Extremes and Moderations," Ammons is extremely concerned with the survival of man and nature, and he recognizes that unlimited freedom would result in the ultimate imprisonment of global destruction. "Rampaging industrialists" are "filling vats of smoky horrors because" they desire "to live in long white houses on the summits/ of lengthy slopes," but they forget that "common air moves over the slopes, and common rain's/ losing its heavenly clarity: if we move beyond/ the natural cautions, we must pay the natural costs…." How, then, does Ammons arrive at a satisfactory midpoint between the disastrous poles of anarchy and totalitarianism? In a handful of poems, Ammons presents either a partial or provisional conclusion to this monumental problem. The world of nature often provides examples of the balance-in-movement that mankind must learn in order to ensure its own and the earth's survival. After announcing, "ecology is my word: tag/ me with that," in Tape for the Turn of the Year, the poet celebrates a natural symbol of positive growth:

On the one hand, the lichen is not a static pattern governed by a center that prescribes the periphery, and on the other hand, the growth of the periphery does not destroy all sense of pattern or stability. The center is both the beginning-point of growth and the reassuring foundation or base of support for the periphery. But, like an ideal form of government for citizens who are all trustworthy and responsible, this center does not interfere with the freedom of the periphery to expand in whatever way it finds necessary and desirable. While the center is providing a sense of unity or coherence, the periphery's "unprescribed" growth from "moment-to-moment" is providing a sense of spontaneity and diversity. In simple abstract terms, survival can be viewed as the center, and adaptability to change as the expansion of the periphery. As Ammons notes a few pages later in Tape, his "other word" (besides "ecology") "is provisional," and "the center-arising/ form" he admires continually "finds a new factor,/ utilizes a new method,/ gains a new foothold,/ responds to inner & outer/ changes."

It is one thing to find an ideal "model" for development and maintenance of continuity in the environment; it is quite another to apply it, however beautiful or efficient it seems, to the extremely complex functioning and interactions of human beings. In "Corsons Inlet," perhaps his best known poem, Ammons directly addresses the problem of how the individual perceiver can both regulate and yet open up possibilities for understanding and growth in his encounter with the natural world.

As the speaker of the poem is walking "over the dunes again this morning/ to the sea", he finds himself liberated from rigid geometrical forms and exposed to more changeable, uncertain, and—to use the poet's own word—provisional shapes:

Static formulations give way to an awareness of process; the confinement of "blocks" and "boxes" gives way to "rises" and "flowing." As the aural imagination moves from "binds" to the off-rhymes of "bends and blends," the speaker is released from the reductive impulse of abstract categorization and experiences the "unprescribed" and ever-expanding "periphery" of phenomenal perception. He goes on to emphasize the beauty of vigorous movement: in the "geography" of the poet's work are to be found "eddies," "a stream" and "swerves of action." None of these phenomena can be captured in a snapshot, and the experience of an Ammons poem cannot be squeezed into an aphorism or paradigm.

The poet refuses to give a name to the "Overall," the totalization of the experience from a retrospective position, although he celebrates the diversity of "the overall wandering of mirroring mind." The value of the experience of nature is the transition or "wandering" from perception to perception; there are continual surprises. Since every artificial boundary or limitation proves unable to contain what the speaker sees, as "manifold events of sand/ change the dune's shape that will not be the same shape/ tomorrow," he can have the confidence that embracing the temporality of experience is the only "logical" choice he can make: "so I am willing to go along, to accept/ the becoming/ thought …". Once "thought" is considered a process and not a final, static formulation, it can be valued along with the "bends and blends/ of sight."

Realizing that "the demand" among nature's denizens "is life, to keep life," the perceiver can admire to some degree even the savagery of predatory birds satisfying their hunger, as opposed to the lifelessness of placing the world's elements in metaphysical "boxes." Without any trace of revulsion, the speaker reports that one gull "ate/ to vomiting," while another "squawking possession, cracked a crab,/ picked out the entrails, swallowed the soft-shelled legs…." Is the poet implying here that all survival is based on the necessity of depriving others of life? This is only one small aspect of the workings of nature; Ammons is careful to differentiate his view of natural process from the notion of anarchy. "Thousands of tree swallows/ gathering for flight" toward a warm climate are "a congregation/ rich with entropy: nevertheless separable, noticeable/ as one event,/ not chaos …".

At this point, Ammons' persona feels sufficiently liberated from the tyranny of falsely uniforming or unifying forces, and now he is concerned that his exercise of this freedom will be misconstrued as total disorder—without the possibility of provisional understanding. The balance-in-movement is achieved when he describes a continual process of the "many" springing out of the "one" in his field of vision and experience:

In metaphysics and theology, disorder is generally conceived as existing within a comprehensive order, diversity within unity, words within the Word (Logos). The Ammons of "Corsons Inlet" articulates the exact opposite of this position: although small orders may be "broken down" and their fragments later used in the composition of larger orders, every larger order at some point is destined to prove inadequate or be dismantled. Furthermore, given the multiplicity of possible factors involved in any transformation, one cannot predict the pattern of a future synthesis from a present one. With every expansion of the individual's perspective comes an "unassimilable fact" that "leads [him] on"—to account for the diversity that bursts out of a limited unity.

The poet, then, considers the small instances of order that he sees, such as the pattern of "blue tiny flowers on a leafless weed," provisionally valuable, but no more valuable than the loss of order. The most important thing is that movement continues, because movement is a sign of survival, which has to be the greatest solace for the poet who tosses aside metaphysical consolations: "all possibilities/ of escape open: no route shut, except in/ the sudden loss of all routes …." No one can find guaranteed protection against death, but the poet's common-sense approach can help to avert the horror of death-in-life. He strives for maximum freedom within severe external limitations, and this aim is accomplished through the interplay of small freedoms and restrictions: "I will try/ to fasten into order enlarging grasps of disorder, widening/ scope, but enjoying the freedom that/ Scope eludes my grasp, that there is no finality of vision…." The poet's desire to confine the swarming elements of his perceptions for a time within a unified "scope" can be viewed as a way of liberating himself from the undifferentiated mess of chaos. The breaking of order cannot be appreciated without the prior existence of order. Likewise, the individual is set free from a futile quest for "Scope"—freed from the universal in order to experience the power and pleasure of the particular—only because he has agreed to restrict the scope of his ambition, to acknowledge his human limitations.

In "Uh, Philosophy" Ammons suggests that the kind of freedoms assumed in poems such as "Corsons Inlet" must be used with a strong sense of political responsibility, lest one individual or group mistakenly believe that the highest form of personal liberty is domination of others. In an age such as ours in which, according to the poem's speaker, philosophers say "that truth is so much a method" and therefore one should be permitted to believe anything he chooses or nothing, the proliferation of ideologies makes it extremely difficult for people to live peaceably with one another:

The word "rhetoric" can usefully be substituted for "philosophy" in this poem, since philosophizing here is an exercise of the individual will. If a rhetorical pattern is like a "snowshovel" that clears away the vast accumulation of data that cannot be satisfactorily assimilated ("possibly a hundred sensations per second, conscious/ and unconscious …"), it can certainly help someone make his way through various experiences. But when the snowshovel is turned into a club, when defense is converted into offense, Ammons' speaker does not want his arguments to be "backed up" or supported by such rhetoric, because he knows that he could just as easily be "backed up" or caused to retreat by someone else's. The more people who are vying to club one another, the less chance that any particular one of them will succeed in subjegating the others, and, in any case, it is hard to imagine the genial speaker of "Uh, Philosophy" wanting to impose an ironclad will on everyone he meets.

Most crucially, the speaker prefers "disarmament" because he is convinced that "the imperturbable objective" of collective survival must always be cherished more than an individual's personal gain or that of his country. He longs for peaceful coexistence to be established as the truth beyond all mere questioning, but feels "hot and sticky" because he knows that no authority, no central force, has been able to check the escalation of the ideological and military arms buildup.

There is irony, though, in the speaker's desire for "something/ to conform to (without responsibility)." The voluntary shouldering of responsibility—on everyone's part—is precisely what is needed to ensure global survival. If we are free to choose our ideologies, we should be happy to honor others' right to enjoy this freedom. But the "overall" "message" of poems like "Corsons Inlet" has already taught us that it is a grave mistake to impose any fixed version of "Being"—much less one of our own total mastery or control over anyone else—on ourselves or those we encounter. If we accept the continual becoming (be-ing) of our individual and collective experience, as Ammons and several other influential modern American poets (among them Williams, Olson, Creeley, and Ashbery) have in their various ways urged us to do, we will not need the threats of external authority to keep us in line; we will exercise restraint on our will to power, with the confidence that it is the most liberating and best possible course of action. Unfortunately, few world leaders at the present time seem to cherish this way of thinking.

In presenting various acts of individual liberation (and its attendant restrictions) in many of his poems, A. R. Ammons sets implicit examples for others to liberate themselves and to help protect individual freedom in general through their actions. Although some readers are put off by what they consider a plethora of "inhuman" abstract philosophizing in the work, Ammons' poetry is filled with inherent generosity, much like the light that the poet praises in "The City Limits":

When you consider the radiance, that it does not withhold
itself but pours its abundance without selection into every
nook and cranny not overhung or hidden …. when you consider
that air or vacuum, snow or shale, squid or wolf, rose or lichen,
each is accepted into as much light as it will take, then
the heart moves roomier, the man stands and looks about, the
leaf does not increase itself above the grass, and the dark
work of the deepest cells is of a tune with May bushes
and fear lit by the breadth of such calmly turns to praise.